Why not become a lifetime supporting member of the site with a one-time donation of any amount? Your donation entitles you to a ton of additional benefits, including access to exclusive discounts and downloads, the ability to enter monthly free software drawings, and a single non-expiring license key for all of our programs.

You must sign up here before you can post and access some areas of the site. Registration is totally free and confidential.

I have seen a few discussions on DC about online data backup. However, I am interested to know if anyone has had any experience, good or bad, with any of the sites that permit data to be transferred by ftp.

My primary purpose is to store 10GB to 50GB of files that I can access while I am traveling. (I already have external HD backup at home). I am not real concerned about security but I do want it to be reliable.

Must haves:- FTP capability to upload and download data- Reliability of service- Not super expensive

Not important:- High quality syncing or sophisticated backup capabilities. Just data storage.

I don't think they have FTP only service, but I've been on JaguarPC web hosting for several years. They run apache server and are very reliable:http://www.jaguarpc.com/

The web hosting account claims to boost your disk quota as much as you need. As you park more storage supposedly it's automatically increased. I haven't tested it out since my web content is less than 100 MB. My experience with them has been that they are very responsive to problems. Also there are user forums hosted by them where you can get tips from other users etc..

You can contact them but I believe to get FTP you'd have to get a web hosting account and a domain name. The longer the contract the cheaper per month but no commitment monthly is about $10 or $11 a month. I just upload and download using FileZilla. If you google .htaccess you can see how to keep outsiders from downloading particular types of files and limit access to the public web stuff(or you could just have one dummy index.html page I suppose,, but the .htaccess keeps people from getting indexes of folders.)

There are also raw storage accounts for less money with other providers but I have no idea how reliable they are. Jaguar has been around for awhile. Any outages I've noticed have only lasted a few hours and are unusual/infrequent.

edit: if you have to purchase a domain name you should be able to find one that allows anyone to host it for about $10 a year.

There are quite a few cheap options without FTP... Jungle Disk and ZumoDrive being two others. I'm working on evaluating the differences between these options right now But I'm afraid that most of the cloud services seem to frown on FTP, though you get more storage for your use giving up that protocol, and most are available through a myriad of means.

My experience is that it takes forever to upload files of any substantial size using a cable Internet or dsl connection, which is what I have. How can you do that effectively without FTP? Am I missing something here?

My hosting account with Dreamhost includes the capability to backup ANYTHING I want and access it with FTP or SCP.Here is their description of the service they offer:

You do, however, get one user per account where anything legal may be stored; your Backups User.

This user cannot have any websites pointed to it, nor may you share files via it... it is only to be used as an off-site backup for your personal files.As such, we keep no backups of files on this account. These are already supposed to be your backups... not your only copy!(Of course, you should always keep your own copies of all data stored with us.. we make no guarantees!)

Every full DreamHost Hosting plan includes 50GB of backups space!(Additional usage will be charged at the rate of 10 cents / GB a month: the best backup deal on the net!)

Seems of rather limited utility since you can't depend on it to be there. Safety deposit box in an unlocked vault.

And can you depend on your hard drive to be there? No matter what? Most people I think, use online backup as sort of an "off site" type of backup. You back up locally, then copy your backup to an off site location. At least that's how I'd hope most people use it. And if you pick reputably, then you can be a lot more confident of your online backups.

I understand how it works. It would have a lot more functionality if the stuff was backed up. For a free service I can see it. But I know even though I back up my web site contents, I wouldn't hire out a web server company that didn't even back up their servers. Seems like a half assed way to do things to me.

I understand how it works. It would have a lot more functionality if the stuff was backed up. For a free service I can see it. But I know even though I back up my web site contents, I wouldn't hire out a web server company that didn't even back up their servers. Seems like a half assed way to do things to me.

I'm sure they back up their servers. But it's a different thing between backing up servers and guaranteeing those backups to someone else. My hosting company doesn't advertise that they back up their servers. But when I've needed something, they do indeed have backups. It's not part of the plans, and I'm sure if they couldn't find it they'd point to their policy.